Post: #5
Title: Re: وقفات تضامن دولية مع عصيان ١٩ ديسمبر
Author: أحمد الطيب بدرالدين
Date: 12-19-2016, 05:30 PM
Parent: #4
اليوم نشر تقرير على صحيفة هاملتون سبيكتاتور
عن التظاهرة الكبرى التي نظمتها لجنة دعم العصيان المدني
في مدينة هاملتون الكندية. شارك فيها أكثر من مائة شخص
بعضهم أتى من المدن القريبة مثل نياغرا و سانت كاثرينز و أوكفيل.
News | Local
Hamilton Sudanese community rallies for human rights at City Hall
12 hours ago | By Jon Wells
Sudanese Protest
Sudanese Protest | Scott Gardner,The Hamilton Spectator
They gathered in face-numbing cold by the big Christmas tree near the nativity display at City Hall so they could call for peace on Earth a world away.
Hamilton has a tight-knit community of perhaps 300 families with roots in Sudan, an eastern African country of 41 million people.
A rally Sunday featured about 80 members from that community holding signs and chanting to support the movement against Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir.
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The timing of the rally coincides with Sudanese Civil Disobedience Day, taking place Monday overseas, which activists fear will be met with a crackdown by al-Bashir's regime.
"The dictator threatened last week he will use violence against peaceful, unarmed civilians," said Ahmed Mohamed, one of the rally organizers. He said al-Bashir has repeatedly taken actions that violate human rights in the country.
Mohamed added they are calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to make a strong statement against such a backlash, and to call for the release of political prisoners in Sudan as well.
"It's not just about expressing 'concern,' it's about holding al-Bashir accountable for any violence against peaceful resistance."
Signs in Arabic and English at the rally said: "Hamilton standing in solidarity with our people in Sudan", "Stop genocide", "Stop crimes against humanity in Sudan."
Liliyan Mohamed, who came to Canada many years ago as a child and is now a social worker in Hamilton, said she has family back in Sudan.
"We're here, standing up to show that we are with them with our hearts and want to support them as much as we can," she said.
A friend, Alaa Abdelkarim, a student at McMaster University, held up a sign that read: "If not us then who/If not now then when؟" Abdelkarim said she travels back home to Sudan most summers to visit family and friends.
"I see how they struggle; they don't have much. I want to support them any way I can."
Sudan was the largest country by population in Africa prior to 2011, when South Sudan proclaimed its independence; that breakaway country soon after plunged into an ongoing civil war.
As of 2011, there were an estimated 16,600 people in Canada who report their ethnicity as Sudanese.
A few at the Hamilton rally waved the former Sudanese flag, a blue-yellow-green tricolour adopted in 1956 when the country declared independence from British and Egyptian rule.
The current flag, a red-white-black tricolour with a green triangle — similar to those of Syria, Egypt and Iraq, symbolizing Pan-Arabism — was installed following a military coup in 1969.
For many Sudanese, said a woman at the rally, the old flag, whose colours represent the blue of the River Nile, yellow of the Sahara Desert, and green of farmland, is a symbol of better days of the past.
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